Most people don't know that reverse lookups can also be designated. If you control an entire /24, you can get the PTR lookups directly designated to your own DNS server. They're actually a whole extra hierarchy in DNS, the in-addr.arpa domain. You build the dns query with the IP address, by octet, backwards:

On the internet, data is sent back and forth through a series of tubes links known as routers. When you send a request to a remote computer, each router looks at the address you're sending information to, compares that to it's internal tables, and sends it to the router closest to your destination that it's aware of. That process repeats until your data arrives at it's destination.

Most servers have names to make them easily accessible (like reddit's web server is "www.reddit.com") For servers that are just routers, or backend machines, often more creative names are used. Sometimes it's as simple as it's purpose "database.example.com" or more complicated and including information on location and type, like "DALWEBWIN03.example.com" Many administrators even use creative naming schemes, like naming machines after Greek/Roman Gods, colors, even guitarsists or characters from TV shows.

traceroute/tracert are computer commands that show you all the routers between you and a given server on the internet.

In this case, the admin has intentionally created a very long set of routes through servers with specifically selected names in order to spell out the opening sequence to the first "Star Wars" movie.

I disagree. As an engineer, you surely must appreciate the effort that went into this. I recall reading something about how there's some decently complex routing in the works here. I mean, yeah it's silly and not at all practical, but I doubt this is actually routing any kind of live or production traffic.

You do know, don't you, that the times reported are the total round-trip time up to and including that hop?

So it takes you 80ms to get to the ninth hop (or however many hops it takes you go get to 206.214.251.1, the first funny response) but notice that every hop after that is exactly the same. Well, it should be exactly the same, assuming you don't have variable latency between you and them.

So that means the additional latency between those additional hops is pretty much zero.

Not that it matters -- obiwan.scrye.net is actually unroutable. He has it set up so that packets never get there. The routing goes around and around in a loop. (The maximum number of hops is 255, so it can't wind up being an endless loop.)

This is no home network -- the company he works for is an ISP, so he's got spare /24s lying around to do things like this.

It's an appreciation thing. Kind of like, one of those things that you do for fun as an exercise. What you have here is the product of a network engineer that had some time on his hands.

Basically, you're looking a simple tool that IT professionals use called Traceroute. Using Traceroute is helpful in troubleshooting because it allows us to see the path that traffic takes to get to it's destination. The Star Wars thing is very basically the "names" that he assigned to each hop or point of destination.

That's perfectly valid. Each hop only needs to know how to get to the next hop so routers within an organization that don't need to talk to the Internet directly, just to each other, can do that over private space. You never send packets directly to any one individual hop, just the final destination, so it doesn't matter to you that private space is being used in the middle.